I love that idea because it could easily be replicated on purpose to make sweet potato breeding much easier. But I love the idea too much, and I’m way too inexperienced, to be impartial about whether it’s likely. 
Hate to be a buzz kill but I think that also pretty unlikely. There are ways to encourage sweet potatoes to bloom, even those that never do otherwise. There are also ways, like soaking in strong sulfuric acid to make the seeds sprout easier instead of waiting weeks, or years for it. I have never done any of it because it just passes on the necessity to keep doing it. I don’t know the germination rate on my seeds. How can I measure that when germination time ranges from a few days to a few years. Instead of worrying about the rate I’ve given it a rate / time priority for the last two or three years.
Here’s a little video that illustrates that a bit.
Ha ha ha, I’m fine with you being a buzzkill. Buzzkill away! You’re the expert, so I value your thoughts. Your thoughts on this matter are likely to be correct.
Ooh, what a great video! Thank you!
I watched some more of your videos, and subscribed to your YouTube channel. 
A few interesting things stood out to me.
In the video you linked, I found it particularly useful information that you have found when sweet potatoes root at the nodes, they don’t make very big roots. This leads me to wonder whether snipping the vine to separate various root clusters on the same plant could lead to an easy way to get big roots at every node without having to bother with transplanting?
In one of the other videos, I believe you mentioned you had a plant that was neglected that bloomed way more than two others with the same genotype which were well-watered. If I understood that correctly, maybe stress can trigger more flowering? (Maybe only in specific cultivars that have the right genes to behave that way?) If that’s possible, that’s a trait I may want to watch for. I’d enjoy having that trait in my population.
In two other videos, you showed a sweet potato that sorta-kinda climbed a little bit.
Did you get seeds to save from it? I’m curious about whether its descendants will inherit the ability to climb a little, especially if some are more enthusiastic and do it far more vigorously. (Laugh.) That would be cool.
You showed what the seed pods looked like, and yours looked a little different from mine. Mine are larger and more bulbous. Though that could just be because they contain more seeds than usual. The flowers are a much darker purple, too. Are those things variable among sweet potatoes, or are those a probable sign that I may have a different species?
I need to remember to take pictures of that plant, so I can show what I’m describing.
Interesting question but I haven’t done any experiments with that, so I don’t know. But there is really no bother to propagating and transplanting sweet potatoes, any little piece of stem suck in the ground will root and grow.
Maybe, I have seen a bit of an indication of that but not enough to say it for sure. I’m sometimes hesitant to talk about things I’ve observed once or twice for fear it may be interpreted as solid evidence of something.
I still have the plant I called Tries to Climb but this year I changed its name to Likes to Climb because this year it did. It’s the coolest ornamental plant I’ve ever seen but it isn’t a strong plant, it barely survived last winter and took a long time to recover this spring. I have less than ten seeds from it which I hope are crossed with the one I call Ms. Bloom. If Likes to Climb does as poorly this winter, I may discard it.
Flower color does vary, some are nearly white with purple/pink centers some are more purple with darker purple center. Flower size varies a bit too, but not a lot.
Color varies on the seed capsules depending on color of the leaves and stems, but shape and configuration is nearly identical. Size can vary depending on the number of seeds inside (1 to 4), and the size of the seed, as they are not all exactly the same size.
Yes, a picture of your plant might be helpful. Also, when you dig it up to take to the greenhouse, a peek at the roots might help too.
Okay, here are some pictures that I just took!
I saw three finished capsules, so I took pictures of them and opened them. They look just like your sweet potato capsules in your videos, and contained only one seed each. So that first one may have just been larger and more bulbous because it contained more seeds.
In the second picture, there’s a green capsule that looks big and bulbous like the first one (which contained eight seeds).
The third and fourth pictures show the leaves.
Interestingly, there are no flowers today, which is odd because there’s been at least one every day for the past two months. However, I watered the plant yesterday for the first time in weeks. Coincidence?
The flowers were deeper hue than most sweet potato flowers, but the same red-purple color. Just not as light of a hue.
I checked ornamental morning glories, and it looks like blue-purple with pink centers is more common, like this:
My plant’s flowers were that deep of a hue, but they were the red-purple color that’s common to sweet potatoes.
Does it look like a sweet potato to you?
Oh, here’s another trait worth considering. It climbed! It wound itself around the stem of a fig tree that was growing next to it. I unwound it so I could tuck the vines into a pot (I figure if I get it some roots at the nodes before transplanting it to the greenhouse, it’ll suffer less transplant shock), but it did wind itself all the way up the stem and then dangled off down onto the ground after it reached the top.
It does have some similarities to sweet potatoes, lots of ipomoea do, but I’m pretty sure that what you have there is a morning glory.
1 Like
Hi do you have any seats to sell
Aww, that would be a bummer. Are you talking about Ipomoea purpurea specifically? I see some people online saying the leaves of that are edible, but none of the sources seem very reputable, so I’m assuming they’re not.
When I dig it up, I’ll see what I find root-wise. If it has tuberous roots, would that mean it’s a sweet potato for sure? Or do inedible morning glories sometimes have roots like that, too?
I don’t know a lot of specifics about morning gloires, except that they are pretty and the same genus as sweet potatoes and, in some respects, look similar. It’s probably been sixty years since I actually planted morning glories. I’m pretty sure they are also just annuals, while sweet potatoes in a warm climate are perennial.
Assuming they are not edible is probably a good call.
No, it would just mean it has a tuberous root, which I strongly suspect, it does not.
Sweet potatoes also do not have “tuberous” roots, they have storage roots. Roots and tubers are not the same thing although I can’t fully explain the difference from a scientific point of view. What I can see is if I plant a potato tuber, sprouts grow from it, and it rots. If I plant a sweet potato root, sprouts and roots grow from it and it itself starts growing again.
If it does turn out to have a tuber, that would be interesting. If it turns out to have a storage root, that would be extremely interesting, but I don’t know how you would know the difference until you replanted it next year.
To correct spelling in my last time I responded do you have any seeds for sale
Thank you very much. I’ll report back if it seems to have storage roots (or tubers – you were right to correct me on that).
As a side note, I finally figured out which species of morning glory was a massively invasive weed when I lived in Hong Kong! I saw this plant all over the place every day when I lived there. It grew everywhere, all year round:
The astonishing thing is that it’s apparently edible.
All those years of living alongside it, and I never had any clue.
Haven’t updated on anything for a bit. I had another video, but I lost it for a while. Cleaning up the dusty corners of my phones memory I found it again, so thought I’d post it.
4 Likes
I posted a little update about my sweet potatoes over on OSSI and thought I would copy it here.
Our weather has been a bit more winterish than the last several years so I’m behind on getting my ground and pots ready for this year’s sweet potatoes. It’s only February so still more than enough time, I’m just used to having everything ready well in advance.
My two favorite ornamental plants, Miss Bloom and Likes to Climb have done a lot better in the sunnier window downstairs than they did last year. Miss Bloom has even bloomed off and on over winter and Likes to Climb hasn’t stopped trying to climb. I’ve been clipping Likes to Climb back to make it a little mor bushy and to make more stems that can be cut off to clone. Miss Bloom has set seed capsules from self-pollinated flowers, but they have dropped off before maturing, it is healthier in the warmer spot but apparently not enough so to mature seeds. The days are getting little longer and nighttime temps a little higher and they are both responding to that.
A third ornamental plant made a bit larger root last year which I saved, and it appears to be keeping well but I didn’t keep that one as a house plant. This plant is a lot like one I kept for a while a few years ago that I called bushy bloomer and like bushy bloomer it makes tremendous amounts of seed. I think it came up in 2023 as did Likes to Climb, Miss Bloom came up in 2022. I only have the one root so no taste testing, but I’ll grow it in better conditions this year and see if might need to be moved to the culinary production group. If it still just makes smaller roots, I’ll leave it with the ornamentals.
I think I can trim the culinary group down to just three, based on storage and flavor assessments this winter. One of those is a bit less seedy and a bit larger vine than I really like but it is too good flavor wise to cull.
It’s not bushy but it’s not giant either and very easy to trellis the vines up. The less seed is because it has a single flower at each leaf joint instead of a cluster of them. This trait makes less seeds overall but a higher percentage of really nice seeds. I think that might be because the plant doesn’t have to work as hard maturing the smaller number of seeds and the single capsule gets better air flow than the big clusters so doesn’t have as much issue with wet and cloudy weather. Cool wet and cloudy can cause mold on the capsules that damages the seed, warm wet weather can cause them to sprout in the capsule, long before they are even dried down.
I hope to eventually find a happy medium with the number of flowers, like maybe two or three per stem instead of just one, or the other extreme of ten or even more. I’m not going to strictly select for that though, it would just be a bit of icing on the cake if it showed up.
It will be a bit easier this year, trimming the culinary down to just thee best; I’ll be able to grow more of each one. I’d like to know if any of them are self-compatible but that is hard to do because the bees couldn’t care less and if I isolate them any that are not, will not make any seeds. When they are blooming good, I could try taking cuttings inside and hand pollinating to find out.
I’m not going to start many new seeds this year, or if so, very few. I’ve wasted too many seeds over the years by not being able to track and care for all the new ones adequately. I’m sure I’ve missed out on some good ones because of that.
I am going to add some new commercial clones this year too, maybe. I think the university folks know what they are doing, and they can test for thigs like disease resistance, brix and so on where I can’t, so that might be a good source of those genetics. Assuming their clones bloom, which I’m not sure they will. I say maybe because my permission to breed with those clones is all verbal. I think it comes under the “ok for breeding by sexual reproduction with a clone” anyway but would feel better about it with written permission. Sandhill Preservation has one too that hasn’t been available for a couple of years, but it is this year so I’m definitely going to get it.
3 Likes
Likes to Climb is such an exciting plant. It would be neat if you can breed tasty clump-root sweet potatoes that can be trellised easily!
It’s just about my favorite plant ever, and I’ve seen a thousand or more. The ones that make nice clumps of good roots to eat are great and every seed sprouted plant is genetically unique but a lot of them still look an awful lot alike. Likes to Climb is obviously and completely unique in phenotype as well. Maybe it has reverted a bit to something far back in the species ancestry. It really is a beautiful plant.
1 Like
That is so cool. Maybe one of the wild ancestor species had a climbing growth habit, and it can very occasionally turn up in the modern population? Or maybe it came from an accidental cross with another Ipomoea you’ve grown?
Either way, what a neat trait to play with. 
It seems to me like it is possibly a primitive trait and it’s kind of fun to think that, but I don’t have any solid reason to believe it. There is just a lot of diversity in them. Purple ones are available to buy and talked about a lot, but I never ever planted one, still purple ones show up now and then, so I guess the genes for it are hidden in the white and orange ones. Climbing must be hidden in there too, but this is the only time I’ve seen it. I’m pretty much positive it isn’t a cross with another ipomea. It took a long time to get them to predictably cross with each other, and I don’t grow other ipomoeas.
I would like to make a bit of money from my sweet potatoes some day and think the ornamentals may have the best shot at that. People seem willing to pay a lot more for decorations than for food. With Miss Bloom’s massive flowering and Likes to Climb’s unique growth habit, I hope crossing the two will make lots of fun new ones.
I hope so, too!
Have you tasted the leaves of your ornamental ones? Even if they don’t make roots, I imagine the leaves could still be used for food.